A Minimalist’s Using Typewriters in 2020

December 31, 2020

This year marks a very important milestone in my life: my ability to return to a retro tech that is still useful today.

Let me explain. I had always been a tech savvy person. It’s in the sense that, I like to keep myself up to date on the newest technology. It’s not just a part of my job but also my love for innovation that may make my life easier, more convenient, environmental friendlier, and so on.

This year, as I have been renovating my house, I constantly found myself surrounded by what my father who passed away a decade ago had left for me such as cassette players, analog transistor radios, vinyls, and a lot of other things. What resonates with me the most are the two typewriters — in the Thai and English scripts that I grew up seeing my father using them for his honorable job as a government officer who always put other people’s wellbeing well ahead of his own. I picked them up during the holidays in September.

My life saving tools for 2020: These are tools that have gotten me through the last 365 days of 2020. I use them heavily for at least 16–20 hours a day, such as the smartwatch to help me keep track of my health, exercise, stand time, sleep, and control my audiobooks. The laptop is the main machine that I’ve been using it so much that its battery’s capacity was completely drained from the very beginning of the year.

The ink ribbons for both machines has almost dried up, so I pushed the keys down freely and write without seeing any words being registered onto a paper. It was then that I realized that it’s quite nice to be able to focus and type freely without any distractions. Whatever I think I type and whatever I type immediately disappear. It’s just me and my thoughts.

As soon as my mother knew about my interest in typewriters, she helped me to take them to one of the very few remaining shops that still fixed them for me. And the rest, as they say, history.

Typewriters is a Thought’s Synthesizer

Ever since, I could never go to bed without laying my hands on the thick and hard keys of these two typewriters anymore. Sometimes, I would type whatever that was in my mind. Sometimes, I would compose a poem; something which I never did before. Sometimes, I would type up a script of what I would like to talk about to my colleagues the day after.

They facilitated my understanding of my own arguments and agendas. Many times, I found myself to be on the wrong side of my own thoughts simply because I didn’t have a chance to lay down all my arguments and ideas on papers. I would be able to return to my original ideas quickly, with a new piece of paper inserted into the machine, and crank out better arguments.

Typewriters are distraction-free and it’s most of time as though I am just writing in the world of ideas that myself is the sole author. I then, also, begin to realize that these typewriters also have a potential to do good outside of helping me narrate my stream of consciousness.

Typewriters are also useful in today’s deeply digitalized world.

For example, I used a typewriter to type up speeches for my colleagues at venues where I could not rely on being able to find a printer, or using the printer (as in being able to connect them at ease), or finding power sockets for both my laptop and the printer, etc.

Typewriters provide “instant speeches” — as in, whatever I type I get the results in a radical What-You-See-Is-What You-Get (WYSIWYG) way. It’s that and also that I have been able to focus more on my tasks and works that I hope to accomplish. I also learn that my spelling has improved greatly ever since I stopped being careless, as in when I am on my laptop knowing that it will correct the typos for me. I also find myself to be more precise in my prose, as I find it to be difficult to type without thinking on a typewriter.

My sentences have become more to the point and much shorter. Every word I type is like crafting something onto a solid piece of valuable fabric. I would think, determine, and decide what I’d like to communicate. Without any distractions, I am usually able to sync of thoughts and my actions more profoundly and accurately. Bullshit prose would be a waste of time and energy on typewriters since it takes quite a force to push the keys.

Also, as cut-and-paste isn’t possible, I have to paraphrase what I read and find pertinent to my own ideas that relate them using both the art of association and the tactics of linguistic crafting. Both the paraphrasing and narrowing my thoughts to the most basic form help me to become a better communicator.

Not only that, I have also become somewhat of a tactical humorist too as I get to entertain myself quite a bit while typing stuff up, especially stuff that would be boring without some nice and easy interruption by ways of humor.

All in all, I find typewriters to be a great discovery, helping me to rethink my own methods of communication: First to myself and only if it makes sense to me then it can or may be discussed with others. I know that we humans think in language. It is a great tool that enables us to communicate with one another across space and time.

Very quickly, my working desk becomes a museum of retro tech. All still works just fine. The best part of it is that they all help to focus in the deeply digitalized world where everything is shouting “check me, watch me, look at me.” I use all the tools that are not connected to wi-fi to craft my thoughts, whether that be an important policy paper or a draft of a task, before I would synthesize it with my laptop to get them sent via the internet.

So, to be able to learn how to be precise and meaning-rich is essential to how we humans collaborate and therefore innovate. I will continue to use typewriters productively and won’t let them to used to form negativity in my subconscious, like what happened a few months back during which I couldn’t go to bed because I let out all my negativity onto pieces of papers before heading to bed. Words might have been let go onto papers but the ideas remained underneath the dirty rugs of my subconscious, which wasn’t nice.

Let this 2020 be the opening of another year of a focus, hard and meaningful work.

Bangkok, Thailand